ABSTRACT
Introduction The adage that “those who do not remember history are condemned to repeat it” resonates among international relations and foreign policy scholars (Bennett 1999; Pastor 2001). However, inquiries regarding the capacity of leaders to learn something from experience have a checkered historical legacy of their own. Hegel (1894) claimed that “[w]hat experience and history teach is this-nations and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.” Evaluating claims like Hegel’s has been a central but vexing challenge for observers of foreign policy. Learning is both difficult to define and to study.
